!!!Vista Ultimate mem diagnostic tool never finishes!! cant boot now!

[sojvcny]

My desktop machine is a home-made build (Abit mobo- )and I have had Vista Ultimate as the only OS . I am not sure which situation has caused my problem so I will describe the 2 possibilities: I had a disfunctional usb flash drive that I attempted to rescue ( tried to format, assign a drive letter, etc; using the windows cmd interface...) I ended up throwing the flash drive away.....Windows worked after that until I chose to run the "memory diagnostic tool" at the next boot. I restart the machine and the mem tool starts. It completes and then just starts again.....It never manages to finish and no matter what I try , I cant get it to let the OS load! It's stuck in this loop ! I let that sucker run all day just to see.......
I have tried all the boot fix commands and system recovery from the dvd... I couldn't use system restore because I didnt have a restore point available and if I did a complete PC restore , it would have put me back to July of 2009. ( My mistake to not have kept current on those..) Can someone help me?? I realllly do not want to wipe out my C drive because all my programs and such that are on other partitions will be ruined.

[Salmon Trout]

You may have faulty RAM... if you have more than one stick, try with each separately.

[sojvcny]

I did as you suggested , removing one RAM stick, turning machine on... then the other.  Still, I have the same problem. I believe that the RAM is fine anyways. I may try different Ram sticks and see but I feel like the memory isn't the issue . Something is a miss. The OS never loads because the "windows memory diagnostic tool" continues to run repeatedly, with never any errors found . It just keeps repeating itself.  Is there any type of command that I can use to instruct the tool Not to run??(cmd.exe)
 -Thankyou for the help.

[sojvcny]

 Do you think it could be that my drive letters somehow got re-assigned or changed when I was messing with the USB flash drive?
I dont know how confusing this will be but below is a list of how my drive letter assignment is on each partition : ( might help ?)

From cmd.exe on Vista Business DVD  I could see list of volumes (only logged in on D: drive) * Makes me think windows might be on D drive now-
---------------------------------------------------
volume0=vista dvd in dvd rom drive*
volume1=letter =C Label =N ntfs 293 GB
volume2=letter =H Label =P ntfs 405 GB
*(volume 1 and 2 are one complete hard drive. The other volumes are a second hard drive )*
volume3=letter =J Label(none) = dvd rom*
volume4=letter =D Label (none) =ntfs  175 GB
volume5=letter =E Label =E ntfs 175 GB
volume6=letter =F Label =F ntfs 175 GB
volume7=letter =G Label =G ntfs 340 GB

It looks like something changed between drive letter and label assignment for drives C,H,and D.
I had a P drive which isn't shown here . It just shows P as being a label of C.......soo weird
-Thankyou for the help.

[Salmon Trout]

try this

start in safe mode

open command prompt

type this & press Enter

bcdedit /bootsequence {memdiag} /remove

[sojvcny]

Safe mode does not work. I opened cmd.exe from the dvd. The message I receive is: " The boot configuration data store could not be opened. The requested system device cannot be found. "
- I tried changing drive letter to see if that made any differece but I kept getting the same message 

[Salmon Trout]

when you say cmd.exe do you mean the Recovery Console?

[sojvcny]

In Vista its "system recovery options" - it's similar to recovery console, yes.

[Salmon Trout]

try this in recovery console

bootrec /fixboot
bootrec /rebuildbcd

memory test may run 1 time & then complete & then Windows start.

[sojvcny]

bootrec  /fixboot       returns:"element not found"

bootrec /rebuildbcd   returns:"scanning all disks for Windows installations.
                                                       Please wait, since this may take awhile...
                                                     
                                                       successfully scanned windows installations.
                                                       Total Identified Windows installations: 1
                                                       [1]  D:\Windows
                                                       Add installation to boot list? Yes<Y> /No<N> /All<A>:
 (If I choose Y or A I get the same result:)
                                                        Element not found

** I tried : bootcfg /query
and it returned -   
                   ERROR: Cannot open BOOT.INI file.

[Salmon Trout]

Are these drive letters all separate hard disks or partitions on one hard disk? It sounds like you may have seriously screwed up the partition table on one or more disks. You may find that reinstalling Windows is the easiest way out of this. Stuff that is not on other partitions apart from the system partition should not be affected. It does sound a bit as if you had set up an over-complex system which was prone to topple over irrecoverably, given that you have not attended to backups.

[sojvcny]

I have 2 physical hard drives.
Disk 0 has N and P drive ( no win OS )
Disk 1 has C,E,F and G drives .

I and J drives are dvd rom drives.


( this is how it was before I ****** it up )

[sojvcny]

  I have no idea where "D" came from all of a sudden ....lol

[sojvcny]

Thankyou for your help salmon